Sunday, April 17, 2016

Putin’s Military Expansion ‘Only Beginning,’ Felshtinsky Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, April 17 – Diplomats,
commentators, and the public typically focus on a particular action rather than
on the context within which it takes place or the extent to which it points to
broader trends, either because this gives them confidence that they can address
the particular or because all extrapolations from it are inevitably subject to
dispute.

But that makes the arguments of
those who suggest that any particular action is part of a broader trend all the
more important because such arguments not only provide a test of the
assumptions of others about the limited nature of this or that action but also
call attention to what may happen in the future.

“Living exclusively on the
extraction and sale of raw materials,” he writes today on the Apostrophe
portal, “Russia is able to produce only two products – arms and armed
conflicts. The first is important as a source of income for the state,”
especially given declines in oil prices. “The second is an instrument for
expanding political influence.”

At the present time, Feltshtinsky argues,
Russia is searching for new places to exacerbate or create conflicts: “Abkhazia
and South Osetia for a new war with Georgia; Crimea and Eastern Ukraine for
continuing the war with Ukraine; Transdniestria for the potential seizure of
Moldova;Syria and Kurdistan for
splitting NATO, destabilizing Turkey and unleashing a major war in the Middle
East to increase oil prices; the Karabakh conflict for subordinating Armenia;
military bases in Belarus as a place des armes for the annexation of Belarus; ‘the
Russian question’ in the Baltic states as an occasion for intervention in the
Baltic countries and the reunification of ties between Kaliningrad and
continental Russia; provocations towards Finland and Sweden which are not
members of NATO for intervention in Finland under the pretext of not allowing
it to become a member of NATO; the seizure of the Arctic in order to exacerbate
conflicts with Canada; and finally, the demand for the return of Alaska to
Russia which sold it 150 years ago as the beginning of an open geopolitical and
military-political conflict with the US by means of the use of atomic blackmail
against the entire world.”

Given this list, the historian says,
“all signs show that the program of territorial seizures by Russia has only
begun with the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of the eastern regions
of Ukraine” and that talk about demanding the return of Alaska should not be
dismissed as an April Fool’s joke.

That is how many people reacted to
an article published on that date in Moscow’s “Gazeta” with the title “The
Return of Alaska will be a Gift to Putin” (gazeta.ru/politics/2016/03/30_a_8151107.shtml).
But “perhaps,” Felshtinsky says, this may not prove to be funny at all.

After seizing Crimea, Putin did not
say that this represented the completion of his territorial goals nor did he
say that his intention was to restore the USSR, the Russian historian points
out. Instead, he again talked about the end of the USSR as “a personal and
geopolitical” tragedy and dismissed Ukraine as a non-existent state.

And taking their lead from Putin’s
words, Russian singers talked about taking even more, up to and including the
Turkish straits and Jerusalem because they are part of an imagined “Russian
world” or because of Russia’s role as “the third Rome,” Feltshtinsky says.

From this perspective, of course, “Poland,
Finland and Alaska which once were part of the Russian Empire are nothing other
than ‘Russian lands from time immemorial.’ And it is thus not be any chance
that from March 2014, Russian submarines regularly approach Finland, and
Russian jets fly up to the air borders of the Baltic countries, Poland, Finland
and … Alaska.”

A year before Putin made these
remarks, “Gazeta” suggested that talk about getting Alaska back was either “idiotism
or a provocation.” But now, the Moscow paper “seriously discusses if it is
possible for Russia to demand the return of Alaska,” a reflection of the
changes Putin’s policies have wrought in Russia.

Felshtinsky points to one detail of
this year’s “Gazeta” article: it talks about the return of Alaska not as a gift
to Russia as a state but to Putin personally.“And it is understandable why: Russia and Russians don’t need either
Crimea or Eastern Ukraine or Alaska” given the price they have paid and would
have to pay for that to happen.

The only people who need this are “Putin
and his small junta of five to seven of the senior KGB/FSB officers who today
run Russia.” These people are “very dangerous” because they did not join the organs
to become builders but rather to “suppress, kill, control, provoke, ‘split up,’
take away and recruit,” all things they “know how to do and do with enthusiasm.”

In the propaganda film, “World
Order,” Putin declared that he had learned as a child on the streets of
Leningrad that if a fight is inevitable, one must strike out first.That is what he has done, even if many have
been unwilling to recognize his moves as a reflection of this perception of the
nature of the world.

In 1999, when he was head of the KGB,
he was involved in sending Russian troops to seize the Prishtina airport in
Kosovo. Later that year, when he had become prime minister, he unleashed the second
post-Soviet Chechen war. Then in 2008, the Kremlin leader invaded Georgia; and
in March 2014, he sent his forces into Ukraine.

“The main problem with Putin and
Russia today,” Felshtinsky says, “is that Putin is not a dictator. He is in
power as a representative of the KGB/FSB, and with the departure of Putin from
the political arena, nothing of principle will change in Russia if the junta of
former FSB officers remains.”

Many have ignored that and have ignored
the fact that “not once over the last two years has the Kremlin declared that
with the occupation of Crimea and the eastern regions of Ukraine is the program
of Russia’s territorial seizures at an end. To the contrary, everything
indicates that it is only beginning.”

Evidence for this conclusion
includes increased military spending, the “bold” testing of NATO’s resolve in
Europe, dispatching Russian forces to Syria, increased espionage activity, the aggressive
rhetoric of the foreign ministry, and “the activation of anti-Western rhetoric
by the Russian media in Russia and abroad to levels unheard of even in Soviet
times.”

“Putin is trying to force the world
community to recognize ‘a new world order’ as proclaimed and organized by the
Kremlin,” Felshtinsky says. “At the basis of this new doctrine lies Putin’s
demand to recognize Russia’s right to a free hand for the realization of the
foreign political plans of the Kremlin to control or seize territories and
spheres of influence.”

According to the Russian historian, “the
tactical instrument for the realization of this strategic task is the
exacerbation of conflicts in various parts of the world” in order to demand
Russia’s participation in their resolution as “a fully equal partner of the US.”And Putin is doing so because “this is the
only sphere in which Russia is competitive.”